Git 1.7.12.1 Release Notes
==========================
Fixes since v1.7.12
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* "git apply -p0" did not parse pathnames on "diff --git" line
correctly. This caused patches that had pathnames in no other
places to be mistakenly rejected (most notably, binary patch that
does not rename nor change mode). Textual patches, renames or mode
changes have preimage and postimage pathnames in different places
in a form that can be parsed unambiguously and did not suffer from
this problem.
* "git cherry-pick A C B" used to replay changes in A and then B and
then C if these three commits had committer timestamps in that
order, which is not what the user who said "A C B" naturally
expects.
* "git commit --amend" let the user edit the log message and then
died when the human-readable committer name was given
insufficiently by getpwent(3).
* Some capabilities were asked by fetch-pack even when upload-pack
did not advertise that they are available. fetch-pack has been
fixed not to do so.
* "git diff" had a confusion between taking data from a path in the
working tree and taking data from an object that happens to have
name 0{40} recorded in a tree.
* "git for-each-ref" did not correctly support more than one --sort
option.
* "git log .." errored out saying it is both rev range and a path
when there is no disambiguating "--" is on the command line.
Update the command line parser to interpret ".." as a path in such
a case.
* The "--topo-order", "--date-order" (and the lack of either means
the default order) options to "rev-list" and "log" family of
commands were poorly described in the documentation.
* "git prune" without "-v" used to warn about leftover temporary
files (which is an indication of an earlier aborted operation).
* Pushing to smart HTTP server with recent Git fails without having
the username in the URL to force authentication, if the server is
configured to allow GET anonymously, while requiring authentication
for POST.
* The reflog entries left by "git rebase" and "git rebase -i" were
inconsistent (the interactive one gave an abbreviated object name).
* When "git push" triggered the automatic gc on the receiving end, a
message from "git prune" that said it was removing cruft leaked to
the standard output, breaking the communication protocol.
* "git show --quiet" ought to be a synonym for "git show -s", but
wasn't.
* "git show --format='%ci'" did not give timestamp correctly for
commits created without human readable name on "committer" line.
* "git send-email" did not unquote encoded words that appear on the
header correctly, and lost "_" from strings.
* The interactive prompt "git send-email" gives was error prone. It
asked "What e-mail address do you want to use?" with the address it
guessed (correctly) the user would want to use in its prompt,
tempting the user to say "y". But the response was taken as "No,
please use 'y' as the e-mail address instead", which is most
certainly not what the user meant.
* "gitweb" when used with PATH_INFO failed to notice directories with
SP (and other characters that need URL-style quoting) in them.
* When the user gives an argument that can be taken as both a
revision name and a pathname without disambiguating with "--", we
used to give a help message "Use '--' to separate". The message
has been clarified to show where that '--' goes on the command
line.
* When the user exports a non-default IFS without HT, scripts that
rely on being able to parse "ls-files -s | while read a b c..."
started to fail. Protect them from such a misconfiguration.
* The attribute system may be asked for a path that itself or its
leading directories no longer exists in the working tree, and it is
fine if we cannot open .gitattribute file in such a case. Failure
to open per-directory .gitattributes with error status other than
ENOENT and ENOTDIR should be diagnosed, but it wasn't.
* After "gitk" showed the contents of a tag, neither "Reread
references" nor "Reload" did not update what is shown as the
contents of it, when the user overwrote the tag with "git tag -f".
* "ciabot" script (in contrib/) has been updated with extensive
documentation.
* "git-jump" script (in contrib/) did not work well when
diff.noprefix or diff.mnemonicprefix is in effect.
* Older parts of the documentation described as if having a regular
file in .git/refs/ hierarchy were the only way to have branches and
tags, which is not true for quite some time.
* A utility shell function test_seq has been added as a replacement
for the 'seq' utility found on some platforms.
* Compatibility wrapper to learn the maximum number of file
descriptors we can open around sysconf(_SC_OPEN_MAX) and
getrlimit(RLIMIT_NO_FILE) has been introduced for portability.
* We used curl_easy_strerror() without checking version of cURL,
breaking the build for versions before curl 7.12.0.
* Code to work around MacOS X UTF-8 gotcha has been cleaned up.
* Fallback 'getpass' implementation made unportable use of stdio API.
* The "--rebase" option to "git pull" can be abbreviated to "-r",
but we didn't document it.
* It was generally understood that "--long-option"s to many of our
subcommands can be abbreviated to the unique prefix, but it was not
easy to find it described for new readers of the documentation set.
* The synopsis said "checkout [-B branch]" to make it clear the
branch name is a parameter to the option, but the heading for the
option description was "-B::", not "-B branch::", making the
documentation misleading.
Also contains numerous documentation updates.